Wet and overcast at sunrise. The forest floor with its carpet of leaves almost glows for a minute or two before subsiding into ordinary brown.
fall foliage
November 12, 2023
Sun through thin, high clouds—enough to make the last few scarlet oak crowns glow. An ambulance wails through the gap.
November 8, 2023
The sun clears the ridge and I’m blinded—the oaks are mostly bare now. Those that aren’t, glow red like a scattering of old barns.
October 31, 2023
As the moonlight fades, pale patches remain—a killing frost. The woods’ edge is nearly bare of leaves below the brick-red crowns of the oaks.
October 27, 2023
Dark at sunrise, but only a sprinkle of rain. Up in the woods, a deer rustles through freshly fallen leaves, breakfasting on acorns.
October 26, 2023
Sunrise: pink and orange in the sky as on the hillside. A white-breasted nuthatch punctuates a white-throated sparrow’s song.
October 24, 2023
Clear and cold with a heavy inversion layer: sparrow sounds blend with beeping quarry trucks. In the dim light, all the autumn colors look like blood.
October 22, 2023
After a windy night, the forest is looking decidedly threadbare in its coat of many colors, illuminated each time the sun finds a hole in the clouds.
October 19, 2023
One degree above freezing and very still. I add my breath to the ground fog rising through yellow leaves into the sunlight.
October 18, 2023
A flat white sky crossed by a crow. Woods’-edge chipmunks in a chipping contest. The color.
October 14, 2023
The pleasing monotony of a cold autumn rain, drowning out all other sound except for a low throbbing in the distance. Leaves fall drunkenly, careening this way and that.
October 8, 2023
Windy and cold. In the wall of leaves at the woods’ edge, the first few fragments of what will be my winter sky.
October 5, 2023
Half an hour past sunrise and the birds are quiet. All along the woods’ edge, yellow leaves are falling by ones and twos. The smell of burning plastic.
September 29, 2023
Every morning more yellow in the woods. What’s happening while we sleep? An unseen full moon. Migrant thrushes descending through the clouds at dawn.